Bakeries choose local wheat to make their artisan bread

As an artisan baker, Matthew Hickman refuses to compromise on the ingredients he uses or the age-old methods he employs.

By GARY GLANCYTimes-News Correspondent

As an artisan baker, Matthew Hickman refuses to compromise on the ingredients he uses or the age-old methods he employs.

”We make bread, literally, the way it was made 100 years ago,” said Hickman, co-owner of Underground Baking Co. on Seventh Avenue in Hendersonville.

Hickman is among a handful of bakers in Western North Carolina devoted to using organic, regionally grown grains because, they say, it is a healthier option for their customers, supports a local economic cycle and represents a natural component of their craft.

“I think the artisan bread industry lends itself to using organic flour,” said Dave Workman, owner of Flat Rock Village Bakery. “I think if you're an artisan baker, in general, you've got a more small-scale, healthy approach to it all that you would just choose to use organic flour, because we're spending a lot more time and energy on each individual loaf of bread than any grocery-store bread you'll find. It's really the only option for me.”

Thomas and Workman are two of the more active members of Carolina Ground, a cooperative of WNC bakers whose micro milling facility in Asheville was designed to link Carolina grain growers with Carolina bakers. Project Coordinator Jennifer Lapidus, a 14-year bakery owner in Tennessee and Madison County, said she began spearheading the initiative in 2008 when the price of conventional wheat jumped more than 100 percent, causing a “train wreck” for bakers of higher prices and compromised quality.

Led by the work of David Marshal with the USDA Agricultural Research Service, Lapidus said, a natural breeding program had begun earlier in the decade to develop regionally adapted wheat varieties in the Carolinas, with the first crop from those initial trials released in 2008.

After securing a grant from the N.C. Tobacco Trust Fund, Lapidus was hired to lead the Carolina Farm Stewardship Association's N.C. Organic Bread Flour Project, a North Carolina L3C low-profit limited liability company that laid the groundwork for the construction of the Carolina Ground mill. Wheat serves as a great rotation crop in the state's tobacco fields, Lapidus said.

North Carolina has become the largest supplier of pastry wheat in the Southeast, so the agricultural and production side of the project was in place.

With the program's first full bounty of locally milled Carolina grains available this year, Lapidus' biggest challenge now is getting local bakers to buy into the program — and Workman and Thomas, who ended a 30-year practice of buying her chemical-free wheat from Montana to support Carolina Ground, stepped up to the plate. “I'm a big fan of both of them,” Lapidus said, “because they've given me real commitments to this.

It's not an easy thing to do to shift your buying practices to support the local farming community.”

Keeping it local

Hickman is not a member of Carolina Ground, but he said most of his wheat comes from North Carolina, Tennessee and Georgia, is shipped to a 100 percent organic North Carolina mill and then delivered weekly to Underground by a small distributor, thus supporting a local, micro-economic cycle.

It also ensures a betterquality product that Hickman insists on, he said, adding that supermodified, heavily sprayed conventional wheat has changed the crop for the worse during the past halfcentury. He thinks those changes have contributed to wheat allergies and bread-related digestive issues that have gained much attention in recent years. Hickman said the use of high-quality, all-organic wheat flour in his breads, pastries and Bavarianstyle soft pretzels — plus a traditional, slow (12-hour) fermentation of his breads that allows the natural enzymes in the wheat to break down hard-todigest proteins — results in a product that can be a healthy part of anyone's diet except those with severe gluten allergies.

“We're educating the public every single day,” Hickman said. “I can't tell you how many times people will walk through that door and they have no idea what we do, and literally we explain to them our process, our breads, we have them sample our breads. It's really an ongoing process, and that's what a lot of consumers need right now. They want more information, and there's a lot of misinformation out there, especially when it comes to bread.”

Lapidus and local artisan bakers are hopeful that the soaring popularity of WNC tailgate markets in recent years is a clear sign of a “buy local” movement, in which consumers are becoming increasingly diligent in sourcing the food they put in their bodies, and that baked goods are as much a part of that as produce, honey and jellies, meat and dairy products.

Either way, Workman said he's committed to the core values that made him an artisan baker.

“As much care as I put into producing bread every day,” he said, “any bakery like mine — like Matthew (Hickman's) — it's all about using the best ingredients and the best processes to deliver the best loaf of bread you can possibly make.”